Data represents a significant asset for many entities. Consequently, securing stored data against theft and/or data loss, whether accidental or caused by malicious activity is enormously important. Failure to do so can be costly in terms of wasted manpower, loss of goodwill from customers, loss of time and/or potential legal liability. To ensure proper protection of data for business and legal purposes, many entities back up data to a physical storage media such as magnetic tapes or optical disks. Traditionally, backup would occur at each machine controlled by an entity. As the sophistication of network technology increased, many entities turned to enterprise level backup in which data from multiple machines on a network is backed up to a remote library. Typically, a library includes a variety of components which include a plurality of media for data storage such as, for example, multiple magnetic tapes. Centralized data backup has the advantage of increased volume, efficiency and redundancy.
In many systems, the data to be backed up and backup commands are sent over a network from multiple machines on the network to a library. One example of a library commonly used in enterprise backup systems is a magnetic tape library. A magnetic tape library can comprise components such as tape cartridges (containing magnetic tape), robots, tape slots and tape drives. A typical magnetic tape library contains one or more tape drives which write received data to one or more tape cartridges.